How Apple became Apple

0:00I'm Josh Christensen, and this is Most Innovative Companies. On today's episode, Fast Company Global Tech Editor, Harry McCracken. They went from almost not being a company at all, to being a company that was able to ship one of the most ambitious computers of its time in a very quick order. Inequality Media co-founder Robert Reich, an executive director of Inequality Media, Heather Kenlaw Lofthouse. The strongest force in American politics is anti-establishment anger. And as always, keeping tabs. Can you imagine if the first thing you ever saw about Kalshi was, we don't do death markets? But first, here's the download. The news you need to know this week in the world of business and innovation.

1:00President Trump addressed the nation, or at least those watching cable, in a prime time address last night. He said the offensive against Iran will continue for another two to three weeks, and reiterated a threat to bomb their power grid should a deal not be reached. He also implored allies to get involved and secure the straight-of-form moves for themselves. Markets did not react well to the news. The Dow opened down more than 1%, the Nasdaq fell close to 2%, and the price of US oil searched 12% to over $113 a barrel. There's been another round of layoffs in the tech industry. Oracle began laying off thousands of employees earlier this week, according to reports by CNBC and Business Insider. Employees said they received emails on Tuesday morning announcing the cuts. Those emails per Business Insider began by saying, quote, after careful consideration of Oracle's current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change, as a result today is your last working day."

2:05The reason for these layoffs isn't clear, but Oracle has been under pressure to cut costs as it pours billions of dollars into AI. Tech companies across the board have been firing thousands of employees in recent years, but layoffs have seemed to ramp up lately, with AI often cited as the reason. Amazon, Pinterest, Epic Games, and Meta have all cut stuff this year. Probably not directly, but I wonder if the Warner Brothers Discovery merger has anything to do with that. That's an interesting question. There's a lot of things obviously happening at once, so it's like, who knows the direct thing, but that's interesting. It might be just like a tiny bit of a roll. Wilson, Slurry, Allison, did guarantee out of his Oracle stock, a large chunk of that deal. Should that deal go through, it still faces regulatory hurdles. It's transitioned to something a little lighter, and I've got lots of puns in this next news item. We've got a spicy merger and acquisition happening in the food sector this week. Spice maker McCormick, see what I did there, is acquiring Unilever's food business.

3:10I can never, it's Unilever, but I always want to say Unilever, but it's not. It's Unilever. Well, anyways, McCormick is acquiring Unilever's food business in a $44.8 billion deal. The deal is the largest in both companies' history. Unilever now will focus on its beauty, home, and personal care business. Investors, however, found the deal to be bland, maybe lacking flavor, and share prices fell for both companies following the announcement. Great puns, great job. Back to AI news, Sora is dead. Last week, open AI shut down the AI video generation tool just a few months after its launch last fall. Sora had a splashy debut, but then its popularity saw a steep decline, which meant open AI was losing a lot of money on these videos. AI video generation requires large amounts of computing resources, so killing Sora does free up resources as open AI continues to try to win this AI race that all these tech

4:12companies are undertaking. Sora shut down was a bit abrupt. Just this past December, open AI had signed a $1 billion deal with Disney to use its characters in Sora videos. That deal is now canceled. Then they also pause indefinitely like the AI like spicy mode, or it's all about you. All those sort of side quests that they kept talking about, which seems to be refocusing, I guess. Well, I think Claude code really kind of took everyone by surprise, and it seems like coding is the main area. The AI is like the two main areas, which was bound to happen anyways. It was going to narrow at some point, and it seems like this is where it is. Finally, in case you missed it, there was a massive heist, this is my favorite story. There was a massive heist in Europe last week, a Kit Kat heist, apparently a truck carrying formula one themed Kit Katz from Italy to Poland got intercepted, and about 12 tons of

5:12chocolate bars were stolen. The news went viral, becoming something of a meme, because of course it would. Even the company took advantage of the loss to ramp up its PR. In a statement, the company said, quote, we've always encouraged people to have a break with Kit Kat, but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 metric tons of chocolate. Someone was very excited to write that copy. Oh my God. You know, there was some, like, some Zoomer PR person, like, guys. I'm ready. This is my moment. But how did they take it? No one noticed them? Where did it go? This is honestly the next reboot of Ocean's Eleven that needs to be about this heist. I would watch that. I think this is as captivating of a heist as the Louvre heist, or last year. Jewels, chocolates, something. Yeah. It was great. Some guys who tried to steal the Mona Lisa or something like that, that, yeah, that

6:14was, and then there was like a detective that was like, it all seemed very like Hercule Poro. Mm-hmm. Anyways, this, what would be the title of this all of murder on the Orient Express? I'll think about it. We'll find something. And that's the news. You need to know today. So, Kristen, if you could plan and execute a heist on any chocolate or candy company, who would it be? Oh, hypothetically. Hypothetically. Hypothetically. I mean, I hate to do this to them, but Tony's chocolate only. Those bars are so big, but they're, you know, they're a little bit of a splurge. So if I could buy some of those away, I think I would. Oh my God. The Tony's chocolate only, little, like, fun-sized candies that were all. All over the place at our innovation festival. Mm-hmm. Oh my God. I love it. Our producer, Maryam, has an experience this quite, yeah, the Tony Chocol only sponsor ship

7:17activation. Yeah. This wasn't just because they've been at fast company events. I really do love them. No, it is very good. They are not currently a sponsor of this podcast, but we will take that chocolate money. And chocolate, chocolate, and some chocolate as well. Do we won't plan a heist to steal 12 metric tons of your chocolate? I can't stop thinking about the Kit Kat heist. I'm trying to think of what I was thinking about. What would you do? What would you do? Oh my God. Mm-hmm. Butterfingers just for the meme of it all. I do love a butterfinger. I don't think I could have 12 metric tons of butterfinger. It's like a nice little, it gets stuck in your teeth. It's an indulgence. I feel like it has to be a Reese's though. That's like a hot, like, classic, could eat a Reese's. Reese's peanut butter cup forever. And they just reverted to their old form. To the old formula. Yeah. So now it's the real chocolate again. Yeah. As it should be. Thank you for listening to our demands. We will hold off the heist for now, Reese's.

8:18So that is nothing to do with anything we're talking about for the rest of the episode. Today, we're talking about Apple yesterday, the tech giant that you all know and love for maybe hate. I don't know. I don't know your deal. I'm not going to yuck your yum. Well, they turned 50 years old, which every time I see a company from like the seven used to be like, it's our 50th year anniversary. I'm like, that was 30 years ago. We're talking about 50, but it is Apple turned 50. So there's no need to really introduce Apple. It's way too ubiquitous. But there are still aspects of this company's origin story that haven't really been covered as much and our global tech editor, Harry McCracken, set out to find and uncover some of those stories. He spoke with the co-founders, former and current employees, admirers of the products, reporters, former employers of Steve Jobs and Wozniak, skeptics of the company in its early days to get a picture of how a group of team geeks came together in the 1970s around

9:23a love of technology and tinkering. He published a great oral history piece on our website and then joined Kristen and I tried to talk all about as the nerds on the internet would say the lore. Hey, Harry, welcome back to the show. Hey, Josh. That's great to be here. We are going to try to get through a decent chunk of the history of Apple. We are now at 50 years. You heard the intro. Harry's oral history on the site is how many words long? Harry, because all I know is 70 minutes in terms if you just want to listen to the article. How many words did it about you? It's 11,000. 11,000. It's 11,000 words long as far as I know that's the longest thing I have ever done for fast company by quite a bit, although it does not include all that many of my own words because it's the people who were there telling the story so it's almost all sound bites. We're going to get into the history. You focused really quite a bit on the early years in those 1970s through early 80s so we'll go back in time and we'll have lots of earth tones and 70s, plaid.

10:29That rocks. Oh, real? Yeah. But I wanted to ask you both this question. What was the first Apple product you personally remember using or maybe that came into your primary focus? Harry, I'll start with you. Well, I do remember the context in which I was first aware of Apple and it wasn't because I used one when I was in junior high. My father brought home the Radio Shack T.R.S.A.D. Micro computer, which was one of the first home computers and it had this major archival called the Apple 2 and I was kind of a hardcore T.R.S.A.D. partisan. So I looked at the Apple 2 as the enemy, although I was secretly kind of jealous of that because it did really nice color graphics and was much better for games than the T.R.S.A.D. I was hoping you're going to be like, oh, I was at Cupertino junior high with the one. I'm a bit younger than those guys. So no, I did talk to one person, Chris Espinoza, who still works at Apple and he's not all

11:32that old because he started at Apple when he was like 14. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Chris, and what about you? What was the first Apple product that you came across? I really specifically remember having one of the old iPod shuffles with the Quick Wheel. Yeah. And I also remember that because when I got it, I must have gotten it for Christmas and I remember my dad telling me, you know they're working on one where the entire thing is a screen. And I was like, yeah, right. Like, how would that work? And then of course, the iPod touch a screen. And then the iPod touch came out like the next year and I was like, how did you know that? iPod was also my first introduction to Apple. Like I had very much was like a PC family, you know, growing up, I think our first computer I care from remember, but it was definitely like a Dell computer, like a 1993 family computer living room, always PCs until we got iPods. I remember getting an iPod when it was like not the first generation because I was like 2001, but it was definitely the first generation had the buttons too, right?

12:33Didn't it? Right. Big, big button and a wheel, stuff like that. I think probably the first one I got was a shuffle, but I do remember the iPod. The first generation and being aware of that, particularly my older siblings being like, oh, God, yeah, we want this. I don't want to listen to a disc min anymore. You can fit like I forgot how many songs, but you can fit a hundred songs on this thing. The first iPod only worked with the Mac, so people used Windows PCs, went really paying attention. And after a couple of years, they brought it out for Windows, which was a big day all up because all of a sudden Apple, which the majority of the world didn't care that much about, had a cool Apple product that worked with their Windows computers. So if Apple had not done that, it might have taken a lot longer for Apple to rebound from its difficult times and become what it did become. Yeah. Yeah. And I will say a quick honorable mention to the Mac versus PC commercials that definitely like seared in my brain.

13:35Seared in my brain. 2006. That was the first one when that came out and yeah, that was, I think that was one of the probably best ad campaigns in history, like period, in terms of like its actual impact and in the cultural site guys, but that's all our personal stories with Apple. Harry, this oral history is exhaustive as we mentioned, covers just large swaths of this history and so many interesting fun less covered tidbits about the company and it's founding. What surprised you most in putting together this oral history? I think what was the most interesting was talking to these people and figuring out if the exact timeline, I realized how much happened and really just a little over a year when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and their friend Ron Wayne started Apple in April of 1976. Jobs and Wozniak were like extremely young. They had no business experience.

14:35They had no money. They had long hair. They can always wear shoes and a little over a year later in August of 1977, they shipped the Apple II computer which was really slick and became really popular and so they went from almost not being a company at all to being a company that was able to ship one of the most ambitious computers of its time in very quick order. I think that really comes across in the piece because I remember getting further into it and it says their age is again and I'm like, wait, they're still 21 and 25, like so much happened and they're still these super young guys. Yeah, even by the standards of Silicon Valley where a lot of important companies have been started by young people without a lot of experience, they were under low end on both fronts. Can you talk a little bit about this is sort of a behind the scenes question, but just like the, I think the access and who you got to talk and what you got them to talk about is just really fascinating beyond obviously you have, you know, was and some of the, you

15:35know, the wing and the big players there, but you also got some people that I don't think a lot of people would go and get to talk to like for a magazine for this 50th anniversary. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. I mean, oral histories are fun because you have to let the quotes do the talking and you can't but end that much yourself and it's fun to have surprises. Maybe reading a oral history of apples early years would assume that Steve was Nick would be part of it and it wouldn't be much of an oral history if he wasn't part of it, but I talked a whole bunch of people who were early employees and mentioned the Radio Shack T. R. S. A. D. I talked to the guy who was the Steve was the act of the T. R. S. A. D. to give kind of the competitive perspective. Some of these people I already knew or at least had met and were easy to get to say yes to others. I had to track down normally when you're right about technology. You are not talking to people in their 70s, 80s and sometimes 90s. You're talking to people who work at companies and have armys of PR people to help facilitate

16:39the stuff. And in this case, I was not talking to PR people and I was talking to folks about stuff that had happened decades earlier. And even though it was 50 years ago, I was impressed by the fact that so many people are still around, still have great memories and we're still excited to be part of telling the story. Yeah, I remember when I was producing season one of Computer Freaks for our sister publication, Inc. We were focusing on 60s, 70s, founding of the Internet and focusing on the Arpanette specifically. And I think the average age of people that we talked to was about 127. But some of the best interviews that you'll possibly get in your life talking to people who are there at the founding of this recent technology because there really is kind of seminal moments in any of our recent memories. We'll see what happens with AI this May. This May Trump personal computer and the growth of the Internet. That still remains to be seen. But it's really fascinating and it's just some of the best interviews you'll get as

17:41we see in this oral history. So obviously we mentioned Wozniak and Jobs, Wozniak extensively talks in this oral history. It seems like Jobs and Wozniak's sort of first business endeavors had to do with these things called little blue boxes. So for people who might not be familiar, tell us what little blue boxes were. Well, this was a whole different world in the early 1970s. If you were making phone calls, you were making them from a landline and you were making them from a landline owned by AT&T, which was the only phone company in the US at the time and wouldn't even sell you a phone, you rented your phone from them. And long distance calls were really expensive. There was something you only did once in a while and you got off the phone quickly. But it turned out that AT&T had the system they used where their technicians could generate tones and send them over the phone line to do diagnostics and stuff and some very clever hackers figured out these tones and also figured out how to make phone calls for free.

18:46And there was an article in Esquire magazine in 1971 written by a guy named Ron Rosenbaum who I got to contribute to the story where he talked about the shadowy world, full of these mysterious figures with names like Captain Crunch who had built these little blue boxes to generate the tones. And Steve Wozniak was at his parents' house and picked up Esquire and read this article and it was so amazing. At first he thought it was fiction and he called his friend Steve Jobs to talk about it. And they realized it wasn't a fiction and it was true. And because Steve Wozniak in particular, what was this self-taught engineering genius, he built a blue box which could make phone calls for free. And Steve Jobs who already kind of had a feel for being an entrepreneur and was always interested in things that might make money realized they could sell blue boxes to college students. Jobs and Wozniak's very first business together was selling blue boxes.

19:46They did not sell all that many of them. But from then on, whenever Steve Wozniak engineered something amazing, Steve Jobs would immediately start thinking about how they could turn it into money and within like two or three years that led to Apple. How did these guys get to afford the parts for computers like this or the pieces? Because this obviously wasn't like there was radio shack you could go and you could get lots of things. But largely there wasn't electronic store so we think of today like this couldn't have been easy to source or afford to purchase. Well, it turns out it was surprisingly easy for a number of reasons. First of all, both of these guys were very lucky to have been born when they were born in Silicon Valley because they lived in this world. There was already full of tech companies and both of Steve Jobs' parents worked for tech companies and Steve Wozniak's father was an engineer for Lockheed and kind of all the people on the streets where they grew up, worked for tech companies and they would mentor

20:46their own kids as Steve Wozniak's father did, but they would also mentor neighbor kids. And if you went to these tech companies, they had all these parts that were defective for one reason or another. Sometimes it was just that the code printed on top was smudged and if you were a teenager interested in electronics, you could go to these companies and knock on the door and ask if they happened to have any parts they didn't need and they would go over to an enormous bin of parts and give you a handful of parts for your projects. That's so fun. A little bit later, before Apple was fully up and running, Steve Wozniak worked for HP designing calculators and HP really likes to encourage its engineers to be dedicated to being brilliant engineers. So as Apple was getting going, HP provided some of the parts for the early Apple computers to Steve Wozniak for free and they also let him work on these computers he was building at their office. So some of the earliest work was done at HP and Steve Wozniak being conscientious, then

21:51went to HP and asked them if they would like to build this computer he had designed and they decided that that wasn't really going to be a business so they turned it down. Despite that, HP did play a role in Apple being Apple because Jobs in Wozniak had almost no money and couldn't have afforded to buy all the parts on their own. You have this line in the piece about how it was both pluck and luck that led to this and I think that really exemplifies that. These things were accessible but they also had to go after them and do more than other people were doing. Another example of that seems to be this home-roo computer club that was coming up at a time that Wozniak was a prominent member of so tell us a little bit about that and sort of how he demoed his Apple Creations there. Yes, in the January 1975 issue of this magazine called Popular Electronics, there was this cover story on this new home computer called the Mitz-Alter which cost $400 and for that you didn't get a computer, you got the parts to assemble it and solder it yourself but

22:56it was the first time that there was a computer that was more or less in reach of all these electronics, hobbyists who were in love with the idea of one in their computer. This was a huge deal and it very quickly inspired this club in Silicon Valley called the Home Brew Computer Club which met twice a month and was attended by all of these people who wanted to build their own computers and a friend of Steve Wozniak saw a poster for it and told Wozniak about it and Wozniak had been working on this thing that was not quite a computer, it was a terminal that would let him connect to the ARPANET which was the prehistoric version of the internet and he took his terminal, he went to the Home Brew Club and he learned that everybody was obsessed by the Altair and that his terminal was not actually all that impressive so he started to work on a computer too and he would go to every meeting and he would bring his computer as a work in progress and his soldering iron and his parts and if you were lucky enough to attend the Home Brew Club meetings in 1975 and early 1976 you

24:01kind of got to see the Apple one come and do existence little by little and a bunch of other companies who most of which are not all that well remembered also what people went to these meetings and we're also inspired to build computers so kind of the whole Silicon Valley early micro computer industry sprung from people who had gotten excited about it by attending Home Brew. Let's talk a little bit about the funding piece of this because I mean, Sand Hill Road existed, there was certainly funding and investments in business but the venture capital sort of infrastructure that funds innovations in the tech sector today really was didn't look anything like it looks today. So you can talk a little bit about one the environment that they were trying to fund their business in at that time to begin with and then how they went about and what sort of like drove the capital to scale Apple at least in those early years. Well there's this famous moment not too long after the Apple one was ready to go where

25:05the sky named Paul Terrell who owned a computer store called the Biteshop attended a Home Brew computer club meeting and was impressed by the Apple one and told Steve Jobs that he was interested in buying 50 Apple ones. The Apple one up until that time had just been a kit for people who were able to assemble their own chips but Paul Terrell wanted an assembled computer although not an assembled computer in the way we would think about because you still had to supply your own case and figure out how to connect it to a TV or monitor. He placed this order for 50 computers for $500 a piece and so he said when they came back with the 50 computers he would pay them $25,000 and so then Jobs and Wozniak went off to the component companies and they were able to convince the component companies to hand over the chips because Paul Terrell was going to pay them $25,000 in 30 days and they could then turn that money over to the chip companies so that was their initial

26:09capital just the fact that they knew they had a $25,000 order for computers and not too long after that they started to try to pitch investors and at first they had very little lock Sequoia which is still a very important company today took a look at that and did not see a business there. Nolan Bushnell who was the founder of Atari and Steve Jobs former boss could have had one third of Apple for $50,000 you thought that Steve Jobs would never be a successful CEO so he turned that down but they did start to make connections from from these conversations and one of them was with this guy named Mike Markella who had worked at Intel and was so successful that he had retired at the age of 33 and he came out to the garage where Apple was operating at that time and he was kind of a computer hobbyist he loved the idea of having his own computer he was not just looking for business opportunities and he had some money to invest and he's the first person who actually invested money in Apple he helped them turn it from

27:12this small partnership into a corporation they moved out of the garage into an actual office he helped them get a line of credit he put in some of his own money and that was what they needed to build the Apple too which was a much more ambitious computer with a beautiful case it was going to be mass-produced and could never have been assembled in a garage and that was what really got them going and because Mike Markella was there and had a lot of credibility a little bit after that then Sequoia and some other investors came in and started to put money in Apple but they probably never would have done it if I had just been these two guys in a garage something that I really enjoyed in the pieces how you sort of laid out what this market was at the time that you have these like you said these computer hobbyists but then like with the store and everything trying to get this product to people who maybe weren't hobbyists right and sort of having to teach them what they would want to use a personal computer for tell me a little bit about those sort of two distinct markets that Apple was like trying to figure out and yeah I love seeing those ads too because it's like yeah what would you do with a personal computer at this time?

28:17At the time there was a big question in 1977 which is the year the Apple 2 came out was a big year because the Apple 2 was much closer to being ready to go computer that almost anybody could figure out and it competed with the TRSAD which I mentioned in another machine called the Commodore Pat and these three machines were way more accessible than these earlier boxes where you had to buy the parts and started them together but even then it was not entirely clear why you would want a computer other than to write programs in the basic programming language and play games and it wasn't until 1979 that this guy named Dan Brickland who was attending Harvard Business School came up with this piece of software which he called a spreadsheet yes it's hard to imagine now but in the early days of computers there's no such thing as a spreadsheet he came up with the idea of rows and columns that would automatically update themselves as you changed any number and that was just magical for people

29:17like accountants who up until then worked with pencil and paper and even if they had a calculator there was just a lot of math done manually and Dan Brickland and his collaborator Bob Frankston who helped him program busy calc which was the name of their spreadsheet they wanted to be out on all the major computers but they couldn't tackle all of them at once and busy calc kind of really needed a floppy disk drive which not all computers had at first in the earliest days you saved your programs to cassette tape which was very slow and unreliable but Apple was quick out of the gate with a floppy drive and so when they were deciding which computer to write busy calc for first they chose the Apple 2 and that very quickly was something that a lot of business people saw as something that would would be worth spending $1,300 for which was the price of the Apple 2 and because it was exclusive on the Apple 2 at first it really gave them a leg up and I talked to Dan Brickland and he said a lot of people actually really were buying

30:21their Apple 2 to play space invaders and busy calc was a nice convenient excuse because it was super useful inside of like it might be worth $1,300 and probably would allow people to write it off on their taxes if busy calc had come out on the TRSAD instead it's not super clear that the Apple 2 would have had enough traction to continue improving and selling and reach the early 80s as it did. I think the story of technology has really been driven like if you look at browser wars if you look at the early protocol wars and certainly if you look at personal computers has been driven not even necessarily by what's the best technology but what is the most accessible and scalable and jobs really had such a great mind for that as has been storied for a long time and there were some some early indicators of that particularly when it came to like graphics and packaging and you know a single unit can you talk a little bit about that and sort of the those early signs of what we all came to know jobs for which was accessible product design.

31:24Yes well Steve was the act definitely wanted other people to enjoy the computer he designed but in the very very early days he would have been just as happy if all he did was was hand out schematics to other hobbyists who could build their own based on his instructions and then after they found an apple at first the idea was they would just sell the circuit boards and you still have to put in your parts but Steve Jobs did really have kind of the vision to see that this might be much bigger and in order to be bigger it had to come truly fully assembled coming in a beautiful case was great both Steve Wozny again Steve Jobs understood that graphics were really important and that a computer that could do color was much more appealing than one that could only do black and white which was true of the apple one and most other computers at the time and I mean at first scale was not much when they started building the apple two they were building 13 of them a week which was not much but that there was a much faster production rate than

32:28the apple one had ever had but within a few years they were selling hundreds of thousands of apple twos and the apple two lions stayed on the market for more than 20 years amazingly enough so eventually there were millions and millions of apple twos out there and it was a popular business machine and even after most of the world had moved on to windows and the Macintosh schools were still using the apple two because the schools could not afford to buy the latest and greatest so the scale totally happened and it was kind of a combination of Steve Wozny to build a computer that was other people would love and Steve Jobs having the vision to see it as being something that could be a dramatically larger business than it was in 1975 and 1976. Marcola who was one of the first investors we talked about him he wrote this one pager about apple's marketing philosophy which had three points one was empathy for the customer the second was ruthless focus which was do fewer things better and the third was input value

33:3550 years later do we still see these values relevant in apple's products today yeah my story kind of ends by addressing that and you could make a very very long list over the last 50 years of ways and which apple has failed to live up to those ambitions that's that's not hard at all but I think you can also see that when apple has been apple that's best it's usually been because it's been good at doing those things and you can still see those principles that he formulated 50 years ago in the in the company today such as the fact that apple compared to most tech giants is not trying to do anything and everything it still is a relatively small product line it still cares not just about the product but also everything is surrounding the product so apple kind of came up with the idea that the packaging of a computer product should also be nice to use and you should not need to find a pair of scissors and cut your way through plastic to open a package and at their best they certainly show empathy for the customer and they still have

34:40a more serious emphasis on privacy than most tech companies which I think is a sign of thinking customer first so no they have not managed to always been true to those values but I think they do still care and when the company is at its best and probably it is most financially successful up to you can see those 1970 values are still in there this might be uphocryphal but if someone who worked in the marketing team in the 2000s with jobs told me once about the packaging that they designed it you know when you open up a box it's sort of like the air releases and it's sort of slowly like lower it's very tactile and they said like well someone asked them like why didn't you just design it say that you just take the box off like a normal box why is it so slow to let it slide out and they were like well it's a Mac it takes time because it's worth it which might be a box of all attributed to jobs basically like doing that job but it makes sense in my head I'm quite sure that Steve Jobs did fuss over the packaging and

35:43the way you would not expect to CEO to fuss over packaging and Tim probably does not personally fuss over the packaging in the ways that Steve Jobs did I think last question since we have you here and talking about sort of recent Apple products have you gotten your hands on the new Neo at all the new low price point Mac I reviewed the Neo you can find that story on fast company as well as the oral history what's your thoughts it's pretty cool I have to say for the longest time people thought that Apple needed to come out with a cheaper Mac and it never did it never got much below a thousand dollars and the Neo is six hundred dollars so it's way under a thousand dollars and there are lots of things that doesn't have in order to have that price point but Apple did a great job in kind of taking out things that a lot of people would not care about that much anyhow and building a computer that still feels very nice for the six hundred dollar price point and if you look at Windows machines that cost about the same they're

36:45kind of plasticky and not all that impressive and the Neo might not blow them away on things like benchmarks and it certainly is not as fast as a MacBook Air because it's using the same chip as last year's iPhone but if you judge it just on a nice experience it does extremely well and I suspect it will have an influence on other computers and that price range and raise the bar I can't go back to eight gigs of RAM I can't do it that worried me too and then you know if you're editing video yeah it might be an issue most people are not doing ambitious video editing they're using the web and writing stuff and maybe playing basic games and the Neo is okay for all that I used Photoshop on that and it was fine well that's a great place to end it for this segment I will be back with Harry for keeping tabs but first a quick break followed by Kristen's interview with Robert Reich and Heather can law loft house of inequality media

37:56depending on how old you are and how you consume information you might know Robert Reich from different platforms you might have read one of his eighteen books you might know him from politics he served on a number of presidential administrations most notably as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton you might have taken one of his classes and you might have seen him on YouTube dressed as a donut explaining why you should register to vote I personally know him best from from being an occasional guest on his son's network dropout this is actually the second Reich we've had on this podcast him and his son Sam as well but the last stint the YouTube donut costume explaining why you should register to vote is a production of inequality media a non-profit organization co-founded by Robert Reich himself inequality media makes videos explaining politics power wealth and civic issues to Americans the company's mission is to inform and engage the public about inequality and imbalance of power for today's show Kristen talked to Reich and

39:00inequality media's executive director Heather can law loft house they talked about how inequality media came to be how they approach creating videos for a broad range of audiences and what hope they have for people in an age where the concentration of wealth and power is more out of balance than any time since the gilded age here's that conversation Robert Heather welcome to the podcast well thank you Kristen here here I'm so excited to talk to both of you and I think there's a lot for us to get into particularly at this moment in time to start Robert you've been bringing the alarm bell about inequality for more than four decades now in multiple ways as a professor a member of presidential administrations through your books we're really going to focus on inequality media the non-profit that you co-founded in 2015 so to start just tell me about the original spark for that and why was internet content particularly like short form internet videos the right fit for that kind of work well sometime around 2013 or 14 my son Sam Reich who I think you've had on your

40:04program yes he's been on the podcast Sam said to me very respectfully I mean he's a wonderful son he said dad I think you have written a lot of very good books and people like your books but if you want to reach my generation it's not through books it's through social media and I didn't fully understand even the meaning of the word social media but he was very kind and he explained a lot to me and it seemed like we needed to have some sort of social media not he and I but I and the other other people that I started to gather needed to have a social media company to do his videos and his point and I think he's absolutely right is that videos do something that the written word doesn't do and this is particularly true of young people who are very acutely aware of what happens visually and they pick up very very subtle details in terms of

41:11visual media but they are not as my generation was readers and Heather you're the executive director at inequality media and I know that you've known Robert for a long time tell me how you got involved I got involved because Bob as I call him professor Reich emailed me and said hey I'm doing a new thing do you want to talk about it and so we talked about it and he and a fellow named Jay Cornbluth had gotten together they had made a feature length documentary and they said okay let's make videos we've done it long for them we can do it short for them and so I came in and said oh let's figure out internet video specifically social video what does it mean what is this first three seconds people care about and this is as you said in 2015 so we all came together I wasn't executive director at the time I was an interim for a minute I served on the board but we were at a point in time thinking you know we have got to be talking more about inequality and we have Hillary and Bernie here you know it's really interesting these two sides of the democratic party

42:16and that's kind of where we were so we were focused on inequality and democracy but now we are focused on inequality and democracy so to have this organization change over 11 years we couldn't have predicted it so we started with social video we are social video first but we've expanded into podcasts we've expanded into feature films we've expanded into doing some radio and so we're trying to create more ripples and say the same thing in many ways nesting dolls approach you know put it in different formats the same messages if I may just add to what Heather was saying Kristen and she's being very modest I mean Heather is the executive director she envisioned this organization she built the organization and deserves enormous credit thank you for that Bob that's true you said something interesting there too about this and democracy part of that which I want to touch on obviously you talk about all types of inequality economic inequality racial inequality but democracy is really core to this message too why is that an important focus of

43:20this conversation especially from the beginning because of one of the most really unfortunate aspects of the degree of inequality of income and wealth the United States has now suffering from is that it has found its way into American politics through everything from campaign contributions to public relations undertaken by very wealthy people to other ways in which really great wealth is translated into great political power and so you can't separate wealth and power I mean arguably wealth is not a zero sum game that it is it is certainly possible for some people to become extraordinarily wealthy without the necessity that other people become poor or don't have adequate resources but power is a zero sum game that is if few people have it that means that other people don't

44:25and this is really what the great jurists Lewis Brandeis was getting at when he said or repeated to have said in the late 1920s America faces a choice we can either have great wealth in the hands of a few people or we can have a democracy but we cannot have both it's interesting how relevant that is today too compared to when he said that and Heather you talked about you know the format of inequality media has sort of adapted and and changed and it's 11 years and I think the world has changed a little bit in that time too right oh we were seeing these issues particularly around wealth inequality CEO pay worker protections democracy at large like only become even more relevant and concerning to everyday Americans have you both noticed that change affecting a response to your work or is there a growing momentum around these topics I would say definitely and I think we can use a few metrics to buttress that point so one is I mean we're now up to 15 million followers

45:25across all our channels we put out for example professor Reis reacting to a clip from a bug's life older film from whatever a decade ago and it was kind of going viral Dan on our team said let's just react to this so in it this grasshopper says we have to divide and conquer and the ants are like no we don't we're going to be fine and so we put that out and we got 60 million views across the internet and a lot of it skewed younger on Instagram TikTok you know also did well on Facebook but so these topics we've been talking about we keep bringing them up in different ways and they get bigger and more attention and I would say anecdotally I mean I watch my TV I watch my phone and you see politicians coming up today young progressives and otherwise we could talk about that saying these talking points that we've been saying the 1% is the problem corruption is the problem and I've seen just these regular I mean obviously we have Bernie and AOC who've been saying this

46:28for a long time and now we have mum Donnie but it's been these new faces coming up and random ads being served to me where you get to hear people saying what we've been saying not that only we were saying it but it is I think it's a testament to the fact that people are waking up this is not okay and it's hurting average Americans more and more and more and our democracy is at risk Robert I want to give you a chance if there's anything you've noticed about this momentum growing or or how people are responding to these sort of issues now when you talk about them well average Americans are catching on to the fact that the game that is the market the economy has been rigged the rules of the market I mean when I was much younger the assumption was that there was a free market over here and then over on the other side was government and the question was how much government intruded or did not intrude on the free market and that was a political question that

47:28dominated much of my youth and much of the politics of my youth well many people are catching on to the reality that there is not a free market separate from government government creates and sustains and enforces and makes a free market without a government you would not have a market now what does that mean if the wealthy have extraordinary power in determining what the rules of the market are going to be in terms of say monopoly or taxes or labor law or anything else then the market is not neutral the market is going to tip more and more in the direction of coming out with outcomes that favor the wealthy and hurt average working people and that's exactly what's happening even in 2016 I noted I was doing in fact in 2050 and I was doing research for a book

48:32at that time I was writing and doing the equivalent of her kind of free floating focus groups across the Midwest and much of the farm belt and many people said to me when I asked who you thinking about for president they said well with their two people were very attracted by one is Bernie Sanders and the other is Donald Trump and I remember at the time being amazed that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump would be in the same sentence and I asked people why and they said well because the game is rigged against us and we want somebody who is outside politics who understands this and who will respond to the rigging against us who will respond to the wealthy who have rigged the market now this was 2015 and we're now 11 years later that sediment has become so central to American politics

49:35both on the left and the right Democrats and Republicans the strongest force in American politics is anti establishment anger at elites who have rigged the game now the right and the left Democrats from Republicans have different approaches and we could talk a lot about that I don't think you're particularly interested for the purpose of this interview but we at inequality media civic action to inequality media I and my writings have very much tried to understand all of that and what it means and how to correct it the point about correcting is interesting to me because of who you're speaking to now through inequality media like but previously in your political positions you know you spoke to policymakers or people with some sort of political power and then obviously as a professor you you spoke to students but now you're really speaking to the internet to the everyday Americans why is it worth talking to these people about these issues especially when some people can feel

50:37that they're a little bit powerless to change things well they are not powerless the point is that is where the power is or should be the only way of breaking through elite domination of our politics and our economy is by empowering average people to become more politically active and to understand the relationship between politics and economics to understand why they have a huge stake in changing the rules of the game in their own favor in ways that enable them to have a fair shot at making it we are not a news organization as such but the news constantly every day is in front of people that's what most people talk about that's what most people understand to be America and the world but the news that is in front of them is

51:38also symptomatic of deeper structural issues changes in the political economy changes in the rules of the game why is it for example that a president can essentially create initiate a war on his own without Congress without our allies without enunciating to the American people why we are going to war and then have such an extraordinary impact negative impact on oil prices on what the cost of living is for actual people in the span of well we're now talking about 12 or 13 days that needs to be explained to people because a lot of people are wondering about it it's underneath the surface of the news but it does require some explanation and that explanation gives us an opportunity to

52:39explain to people the structure of both the economy and our political system and the ways in which they are inextricably wed together we often talk about framing right so something will come in from the news I mentioned a bugs life that wasn't the news that was just something that was trending and had a good point yeah so it's about seizing these opportunities and putting different frameworks on them and again seeing what resonates with people and then emphasizing that and the statistics are staggering I mean we were talking about the numbers going up so our followers are going up in the engagements and those kind of metrics that any internet video or digital media company looks at but I mean 19% of federal campaign donations in 2024 were made by billionaires that's one out of every five dollars 300 new billionaires have been over 300 have been made you know coined whatever you whatever were used for billionaires in the past eight years I mean there is such an extra we are in extremists around this ultra wealthy power and the more ways

53:48we can say that and point that out oh the what's happening with fossil fuels in the environment and why did that you know xyz policy just happen oh let's let's follow the money it might be because it partially you know there were donations made by fossil fuel companies and there was policy made as a result of that and there are some lobbyists at play or this week we had the ticket master there was going to be a big anti monopoly push and musicians were excited about it and fans were excited about it we are being take advantage of with fees and how we are charged and the experience we have in order to see artists play music and they weren't held accountable I mean the department of justice just kind of you know gave them I don't even think a slap on the wrist is accurate so I think everyone is seeing it but we try to keep pointing it out in a way that draws the bigger picture and we try and do it in a way that's compelling and engaging and then we move on to the next thing right like everyone else with their attention spans the other point here and I want to build

54:51on what Heather just said this is nonpartisan in the sense that we are not touting the democrats we are not pro republican but we are pro average working people this is something very very important because average working people are the ones who are bearing the costs of a system that is no longer in their hands they are bearing the costs of political decisions that are helping enrich those who are already rich and are making it harder and harder for those who are not rich to get ahead that's the story of America at this particular point in time that's the underlying anger that we are dealing with in this country it does seem very compelling I mean you mentioned engagement and every time I see your posts there's thousands of likes and and all these comments have you been sort of surprised by that reaction or engagement or is that

55:55heartening to see people like actually interacting with with some of this content I'm certainly heartened by it I am amazed by it I mean I'm again of a generation that never saw these kinds of numbers never saw this kind of responsiveness I'm in the old again the old kind of book and article world I mean it's oh please you have it it's been this no no no it's been an adjustment over the last 10 15 years but yes when I used to write books I mean to get to get 10,000 or 15,000 people buying a book or responding to a book or responding to an article that I wrote would be just you know would put me into into heaven I would just be amazed but we're seeing numbers that are beyond anything that I had experienced before in my career are there sort of any particular

56:57tactics for reaching new audiences who may not be aware of these issues or agree with your personal politics to still break through and educate them in this way it is a combination of a a variety of experiments and experimentation empirical experimentation is really at the heart of it because we try to be very agile we are continuously trying new things we understand that and this is true of a for-profit as well as a non-for-profit organization that success is and can be an enemy because success makes it harder to change success makes it easier for everybody inside an organization to say well we did it this way let's just keep doing it this way so what we are blessed with is a group of people who are not bound by success who want to

57:58continuously find ways in which social media can be used in new effective modes and there are a lot of people that follow us and I don't mean follow us in the sense of following just tuning in there are a lot of organizations not for profits there are a lot of social media groups that I've noticed use techniques that we develop because they're so effective and that's great we don't try to stop anybody from using these techniques in fact quite the opposite we develop new techniques and we want the world to use them I notice you do a lot of sort of joint posts with other accounts other nonprofits other similar organizations as well which seems like a great way to sort of bolster this right and and continuously reach new people and new audiences that's it we love a collab post on instagram and thanks to these companies who are making it easier for us to do that but yeah we work with a lot of different people we have different experts come

59:02in we lean on different organizations to surface data in interesting ways that we can use but in terms of persuading people so every platform is different right if you have a bunch of people following you on average they're probably going to skew in a certain direction because they follow you and they interpret your content in a certain way but the good thing about the internet and the way we can play around with the digital media is that you can test your content with people who don't follow you right and you can try and get it out in new ways and so that's what we try to do we try to say oh did that message hit with I don't know self-proclaimed independence and you can kind of see how the content does and then you can try and get it out beyond your specific followers so you're trying to get beyond the choir and all of those cliches and we are able to do it but it takes time and thought and it's so fun to see some of the qualitative feedback when we do tests and they don't know who Professor Reich is you know they don't say oh he was with the Clinton administration

1:00:04so therefore I have thoughts about him they say things like wow that presenter was really compelling or who's the actor I really heard what he said about the minimum wage and so it's fun to see you've got to be savvy about it you can't just do one post and hope that you know a full range of America is processing it because they're not for a lot of reasons and so you have to be savvy about how to get content out to different groups of people we're talking a lot obviously about communication and messaging and educating people about this I guess I'm curious if both of you think like can this all of these issues of inequality be solved by messaging is it just a point of first making sure that people are aware and and understand what's going on I think it is fundamentally a matter of explaining to people what they already observe and feel in terms of the political economy around them themselves I mean people are very acutely aware for example of prices they know exactly what's happening at the gas pump every time they fill up a gallon you

1:01:10know their their gas tanks they see precisely what's happening they're very aware of their jobs they're very aware of their incomes they're aware of the cost of childcare the cost of elder care people are immersed in this world but what they lack very often is not understanding of why it's not just supply and demand the economic rationales and understandings are important but what's happening goes far beyond supply and demand what's happening has to do with both the institutions of our society everything from the federal reserve all the way through how state governments are operating and how income taxes versus sales taxes are working but it goes fundamentally to questions of power who has the power how do they exercise that power how can they be made more accountable with regard to the power that they are exercising both in the public sector

1:02:12and in the private sector I would just add that our mission is to educate and engage so we don't write public policy you know we're not writing the latest wealth tax that someone's doing that's not our role our role and we've owned it from the beginning is educating and engaging and then people can feel empowered to request different things of their elected officials they can go out and sign petitions they can run for office themselves they can be the leaders that we need and that many of them actually want to be so so much needs to be done to solve lesson inequality and the gaps here and so much of it is systemic and policy related but when I think messaging is key and that's that's our role in the background of everything we're doing is our understanding that the political economy and its politics and economics it's a political economy moving through time changing through time and every week it changes something

1:03:19else is changing and those changes are affecting average working people average Americans in very profound ways but they don't know it they need to understand it they want to understand it there's a hunger out there for understanding all of this in very real terms not in theoretical terms not in terms of abstract models but in terms of actually what is happening and why is it happening this way last summer you released this documentary about Robert's last semester of teaching called the last class and in that documentary Robert you say a true leader helps people overcome cynicism and both of you have mentioned you know that a goal of that was to show how education can triumph over cynicism I think that's really interesting when these issues that you're talking about can make people a little bit cynical about the state of the world so I guess like how do you sort of veer away towards cynicism and and and towards hope and do you have hope about all this well I certainly have hope and I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if I were not hopeful

1:04:21but I think there's a difference between skepticism which is appropriate I think people do need to be skeptical when they hear the news when they hear when they view social media when they're engaged with all of the ways in which facts and news and lies travel at accelerating speed but there's a difference between skepticism and cynicism I think it is very important for all of us to understand that hopelessness is a dead end that's the end of the road we can't reform our system we can't change our democracy we can't make the economy work for most of us we can't create a society that is a society that most of us value and most of us would like to be a member of if we lose hope if we become so cynical that we basically say to ourselves it's not worth even trying and that's something I think that is in the background of what we're trying to do we're trying

1:05:27to give people levers ideas not only empower them through understanding what's actually happening but also empower them through a sense of what they can do as ordinary Americans well I think that's a great place to wrap up I mean there's so much more we could talk about it and I think I had lots more questions but I love ending on that thank you both so much for coming on the podcast thanks Kristen oh thank you Kristen okay we're back with Harry and it's time to wrap up the show with keeping tabs this is where each one of us shares a story trend or a piece of pop culture we're following right now Harry since you're our guest what do you keep in tabs on I've been paying attention to a trend which is more and more visible and has been written about a number of times including as reclined in the New York Times recently and that is this growing digital divide between people who oftentimes work in the tech industry it may be in the San Francisco area and are all in on AI

1:06:33and kind of rearranging their life to be very AI centric and in some cases either paying a lot of money for AI or working at companies that pay for their AI and the rest of the world which is made up of people who are not that serious about AI and in fact in some cases are very skeptical about AI and are not only not using a lot but are bending over backwards not to use it and in some ways this reminds me a little bit of the digital divide that existed in the 1990s when not everybody was on the internet and that there were some people who were using it a lot and it was changing their lives and there were in the early days an equal number of people who weren't using the internet in some cases either because they just didn't have access or couldn't afford it and people talked a lot about the fact that the internet users might have a leg up on everybody else and this new trend with AI is a little bit different because in some cases people are very negative feelings about AI in a way that I don't recall

1:07:33people having negative feelings about the internet but I do see some parallels yeah the negative feelings in the reactions I think is the one different point because in terms of the adoption I think you're absolutely right it feels very much like the internet or even like what we were talking about with personal computer use back in the day but people are very angry and frightened by AI and I think it basically just comes back to the fact that messaging has been like well it could wipe out the entire economy and steal your job so I get that to an extent and also a lot of what we see from AI these days is AI slop and yeah it's maybe not having such a great impact on things like social networks so far so that there are lots of reasons to be skeptical about AI yeah yeah I was going to say there's something interesting too in the different ways people are using it I'm blanking on the specifics of this piece I read but it was basically like if you are sort of aware of the limits of AI and using it in these ways where you're still sort of in control

1:08:36of your cognitive process and like just using it as a tool that sets you up better than if you were totally outsourcing all your thinking to AI and sort of just like relying on it in these ways where it replaces everything for you and so like there's also that divide in sort of use cases for AI and like an understanding how it can fit into your life and how you would adapt to it well so much about it is just yeah exactly what would you use it for so I think some of the divide with like the Silicon Valley folks like if you work in the tech industry you probably have one just a little bit more of a literacy with tech in general but also some of the things that AI has gotten really good at is coding is stuff that would be broadly applicable to tech workers I admit like I do use it like AI and and where I do it I think it's helpful for like summarizing things or helping with some research like Christian was talking about but I don't know how I would build my entire life around AI at this point given what I do it's speaking of gen AI in in particular

1:09:40because I use a ton of machine learning stuff in terms of automations in editing and in processes like making this podcast right now so maybe I'm lying maybe my life is built around it but then other people it's like two conversations because if your main view of AI is okay I'm using a chatbot the way I would a search engine and AI slop videos online I know a lot of people in the arts and a lot of people in video production in TV film stuff like that who are like this is not good for our industry I don't like this this is threatening our jobs and it's not good and I think they're kind of right because like the AI video slop is it's not good it's not anywhere near as good as what AI is actually good at so it's like two different conversations because this is such a sprawling technology with different use cases that aren't growing and building at the same right in every sector yeah I found that piece which is on fast company called AI is creating the

1:10:42first generation of cognitively outsourced humans and so the line that stuck out to me was basically like the the future is not going to belong to the people who use AI the most it'll belong to those who know when not to use it so I think it is like applying to what specific circumstances are using AI for yeah yeah it's not about quantity it's about quality and I think probably some of the most effective users of AI well we'll use it rather sparingly but in ways that are actually effective and beneficial well that makes me feel better Kristen what are you keeping tabs on oh gosh so I just saw these new calcium ads in DC did you see I have not seen these no they list out calcium rules rule number one is we ban insider trading well okay you don't ban it it's against the law calcium number two is we don't do death markets rule number three is we aren't the house and rule number four which I love that it's all the way at rule number four is we operate under us law wow okay there's already great reactions to this online which is very you know along the lines

1:11:45of oh my ad saying I follow the laws raising a lot of questions it seems like something you shouldn't have to call out exactly like if I showed up to a restaurant tomorrow and the waiter came over it was just like um let me let me before I redo the specials today I just want to let you know that we are in compliance with the health department yeah wouldn't you question that a little bit yeah I'm like why did you need to call that out the table it's just so interesting to see this marketing approach from calcium because it feels like what an SNL skit of a marketing approach for calcium would come up with and I just I can't I can't wait to see what's next oh my god and also I feel like a pretty substantial percentage of the people in the world have never heard of calcium yet if they're not into this stuff and this might be the first time they're exposed to this brand and it is not terribly welcoming way to learn what calcium is can you imagine if the first thing you ever saw about calcium was we don't do death markets like what oh my god

1:12:46oh that'd be rough well I'm sure Jeff beer is gonna have a lot on that on fast company dot cob and in the next episode a brand new world just coming out in another week so stay tuned for that my keeping tabs is going to be like a hard left turn into something super silly so my tiktok algorithm has decided to serve me this guy who's basically started a series of vlogging for the past month that starts off hi I'm Steve I'm getting into community theater and I have no idea what I'm doing and he's chronicling his journey from starting to prepare for an audition for community theater to his audition which was this past Saturday I don't know what musical it's for but I've been following this and it's just very sweet and earnest in this guy and it's not like he's blowing up online like videos have I think look at most like 20,000 30,000 views mm-hmm but it's been served to me because of course I'm a theater adult and this has been served

1:13:46to me and I am way too emotionally invested in whether Steve gets cast in this musical oh yeah but I do have a good update Steve got a callback excited you got a callback better than reality TV yeah better than real with the TV so Steve if you're a fan of the most innovative companies podcast I'm rooting for you rooting for you buddy there's a lot to say and that has been said about this this sort of dichotomy of like going on the internet to talk about getting off the internet right like there's there's this trend of like oh use these bags that are these analog bags or whatever and some of that feels performative in a way but I I love these things where you're actually following someone like do something in real life like yeah and then come to talk about it on the internet you're like oh this is his little side quest thing he's doing for real and I think that in a way that's more inspiring yeah you know people who film themselves staring at the wall for an hour to get off their screens it's like well this is someone who's doing something else

1:14:48with his time yeah exactly you're you're kind of like take a more of a lesson through of Schrodinger's cat like you don't have to be observed all the time but I think the thing that like strikes me in what like strikes a quarter of people like Steve is just like the earnestness that they're just earnestly approaching something that they're not necessarily good at or have an expertise in which is plenty of that online I mean I love watching people who are like experts at what they do doing interesting things online but there's something refreshing about just uh that feels very like old internet like web 1.0 internet of people just earnestly doing things trying something yeah yeah no that being said I have a very limited window into this guy's life and maybe the cynical thing in me is like oh I hope this isn't a can bone situation but yeah there are all these examples of algorithms favoring stuff that makes people angry yeah and also algorithms favoring stuff created by people to get attention and uh earnestness is kind of in short supply on the internet and any example of that being out there and interesting to people

1:15:52feels good yeah it does it's really nice and I think the fact that it's also like it's not a huge huge huge viral head like this isn't it's just a guy that's like it's literally just like the New York theater like community has been getting served this I think and it's just a few like a few thousand people following this regularly and I'm just like oh go Steve I think it's a good place to leave it harry thanks so much for coming on the show thank you folks there's a lot of fun that's it for most innovative companies our show is produced by Blake Odom Sam Cabower how a Tori and Mariam Kippur Ruizai editing by Matt Todor mixing sound design by Tad bottoms and Nicholas Torres and our executive producers me remember again to subscribe rate and reveal and we will see you next week